


half light

by flwrpotts



Category: Archie Comics & Related Fandoms, Riverdale (TV 2017)
Genre: F/F, F/M, Gen, M/M, Tumblr Fic Collection, aka all the weird short things I want to save b4 tumblr eats them
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-01-17
Updated: 2019-05-21
Packaged: 2019-10-11 18:02:53
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 6
Words: 9,839
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17451776
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/flwrpotts/pseuds/flwrpotts
Summary: there are different kinds of hurt. three broken fingers on his left hand. a mother whose love and cruelty taste the same. bruises a shade of burst plum all up his ribcage. the difference between the children they were and the scarred up, barely adults they’ve been forced into becoming. sprained wrist. bloody teeth. bad heart.“it’s not that bad,” he says, struggling into an upright position. betty blinks twice and then clambers onto the bed, surprisingly ungraceful. she kneels in front of him, pushing the hair back from his forehead to examine the thin cut along his hairline. “really, betts, don’t worry about it.”OR.a place to keep all the random drabbles and oneshots





	1. anonymous club (veronica/reggie)

**Author's Note:**

> listen. im still real fucked up abt that kiss. title is from the song of the same name by courtney barnett!

i.  the doom is part of the appeal. reggie’s hands skim the smooth expanse of her back, volcanic warm and dangerous to the touch, and he marvels at the strangeness of veronica lodge, this scrap of black silk and champagne, cigarettes and sex. _maybe this time_ she sings, and her eyes draw him across the room, obsidian dark, and he knows that this will never last but he wants it anyway, wants it as bad as he’s ever wanted anything.

it’s here, this place that they’ve bled themselves out for, given up money and morals and any hope of getting out of the apocalyptic spiral, this fucked up kind of speakesy where she kisses him for the first time, all big little girl grin and ropes of pearls around her throat.

veronica tastes like the luxurious, dark cherries she insists the bar stocks and the vodka she pours into her virgin drinks when she thinks no one is watching. it strikes him through like electricity, like the first time he tried coke or maybe when his father broke his wrist in the ninth grade. something that blinds everything else in the world, creates a moment as hard and clear and riveting as a diamond.

he is pulling down her black lace underwear and she is knotting her elegant fingers through his hair, and reggie has no doubt in his mind that they have no chance of survival, that they are as absolutely condemned as anyone else. it’s a desperate consolation in a bleak and harrowing world, but he can’t find it in himself to care.

 

ii. the first anniversary of jason’s death comes and goes and nobody remembers, too caught up in their own personal epics and tragedies. reggie realizes a week too late and spends three days drunk.

each day veronica comes into the speakesy to find him sprawled behind the bar with a bottle of whiskey dangling between his fingers. bad business, but she can’t bring herself to care. in class he sits two seats in front of her and she watches as the football star collapses into a pile of soul and broken bottles. veronica stares at the back of his head and tries to knit him back together.

she comes in on the one night a week the bonne nuit is closed and he is lying on the leather booth with his head back, tears all down his face like precious gems. she turns around to press her forehead into the wall and quietly contemplates suicide.

“reggie,” she says finally, voice loud and clear. “reggie, i’m really sorry.”  
she presses a hand against his ankle, and then he is sitting up and there’s a feeling in her spine she wouldn’t wish upon anyone, not even her father.

“veronica,” he says, looking at the floor. “it’s fine.”

she goes behind the bar and grabs a bottle of top shelf whisky she’d been saving for a special occasion.

“cheers,” she says, toasting him, and then tips the bottle back next to him.

 

iii. they always take their smoke breaks up on the roof, far away from the crush and pull of customers. the monotonous work of counting cash is done for the evening, and the world is fresh and dark in the clean black of night.

“never have i ever,” he drawls obnoxiously, making veronica roll her eyes. “um- taken percocet.”

veronica exhales smoke from her pretentious sobranie cigarette and puts down a finger, mouth curling at the side in a half smile.

“really?” he asks, strangely delighted, and veronica laughs in the guilty, secretly proud way of born again converts.

“i was a person before riverdale, you know,” she teases, but there’s a soft, liquidy sadness to it that sobers them both.

“hard to remember,” he says, looking out at the small, flickery lights of the town. he can barely remember that there’s anything besides riverdale, sometimes, that there’s a world outside this claustrophobic downwards spiral.

veronica’s cigarette is down to its poison gold filter. she ashes it neatly into a pile with her black manicured fingers and for a moment he is struck with the memory of jason, his same unearthly elegance, shared small gestures that spoke of family lineages, of private schools and tennis lessons and family maids so different than his family with their slick new money, their nouveau riche hugo boss suits and drakkar noir. he’s always been faking it, something that she has born into her blue blood.

“never have i ever fucked ginger lopez in the girls locker room,” she challenges, blowing smoke, and then the moment is forgotten, lost in all the others.

 

iv. after it’s over, they end up in her bed, a bare mattress covered in her silk sheets, remnants from a different life, a different girl. veronica watches the revolutions of the ceiling fan and listens to reggie’s breath start to steady beside her. there’s a trail of purpling marks up her thigh and the jukebox from pop’s floats up through the ceiling, blurry and distorted. she hums along a little to the music, something from a forgotten era, something french.

“is there any way that this ends happily?” he murmurs to her, voice sleep soft and quiet. veronica tucks herself into his side, sneaks a hand up so she can feel his heartbeat against her palm like some ancient blood oath.

“no,” she says, and he presses his mouth to her temple.

“i didn’t think so,” he admits, and runs a hand through the messy peaks of his hair, an unreal shade of blue black in the dim light. “it’s only a matter of time before your father offs me too.” he drags a finger across his throat, an exaggerated grimace that draws up the ghost of the boy he used to be, but veronica is unamused.

she shifts to straddle him, lowers herself down on him until he inhales sharply. “if you die,” she says slowly, meaning it. “i will burn this town to the ground.” his eyes flutter behind his closed lids, and for a moment it’s close enough to love that veronica isn’t able to tell the difference.

 

v. the night of the card game they count all the bills and then throw them around, burst the meticulous stacks of hundred dollar bills into the air and then dance around in them, laughing like little kids in the snow. there’s something so strangely thrilling about cheating, about taking something that isn’t theirs and building something out of it.

he pops open the bottle of veuve cliquot she magics up and laughs when the foam runs down his wrist, swigging straight from the bottle while veronica steps on his toes and tries to steal it back.

she’s something beyond mortal tonight, something straight out of a fairytale book. something caught between angel and demon with her expensive perfume and bare feet and flickery, dangerous grin.

he sits on top of the mahogany bar while veronica walks back and forth, waving her magnum of champagne as she tipsily recounts the story again. he’s half ready to catch her, some small part of his drunken brain worrying about things like the slick bills on top of the glossy wood, the ease with which she could fall down from the hair thin knife she’s walking on.

“listen,” she says, and then collapses heavily in his lap, one hand coming up to steady her. reggie should have known that veronica could cheat death, could play cards with the devil and have a hand of straight aces if she wanted, could probably walk out of riverdale and not even have to count her losses.

she smells like gimlets and glitter. her mouth shines purple as a bruise. she is startlingly lovely and her breath washes hot across his face and she traces a finger down the long planes of his cheekbone and he is fucked, has been for a longer time now. “listen,” she says again, but she is far too drunk now, dissolves into laughter.

“you’re the only one i have left,” she whispers finally, slurring a little. he carries her to bed.

 

vi. it ends as all things end. archie comes home as all good ol’ boys are wont to do. veronica pretends she isn’t going to go to him and then does it anyway, falls back into his embrace like an alcoholic falls into a bottle. reggie understands- he has a redheaded boy that he’d go back to too, if he could, if he hadn’t washed ashore on july fourth with a bullet hole in his forehead.

“and that, ladies and gentlemen, is how you lose her,” he announces to the empty bar midafternoon on a tuesday, and then washes back the vodka that still tastes like her mouth.

 

 

and in the end, it is just another scar on two bodies full of them.

  



	2. time to pretend (reggie/veronica)

when they tell her, the first thing she does is laugh. **  
**

it’s a friday night and the bonne nuit is turning a brisk business, josie sending her voice into shattering highs and thrilling lows while reggie serves overpriced mocktails, kicked up to the real thing for those who know how to ask. veronica’s in a good mood, the best she’s been in in a long time, flirting with patrons behind the bar in her sequined dress and winking at reggie when he catches her eye, looking like something from a fitzgerald novel in the dim lighting of the room.

there’s a mostly decorative old fashioned phone behind the bar, a sleek black thing that reminds her of the princess phone she’d had on her bedside table as a child. she turns, surprised, when it rings suddenly, the sound distracting in all the ambiance of the room.

“hello?” she asks into the receiver, half laughing as she watches a tipsy freshman try to tip reggie a five dollar bill like one would a stripper.

“is this ms. veronica lodge?” asks a voice, serious and masculine, like a detective out of a noir movie. she can picture a man behind a desk, a cigar between white teeth, a problem that needs solving.

“it is,” she says slowly. “might i ask what this is about?”  
“this is detective mulwray with the canadian police. you were listed as the emergency contact for mr. archibald andrews?”  
veronica’s mouth goes dry. the tangled mix of fear and panic and relief- archie is found, archie is coming home, archie is safe- curls up through her mind like cigarette smoke, leaving her lightheaded.

“where is he?” she demands. “is he alright?”  
“ms. lodge, i am so sorry to have to tell you this, but there was an incident involving a bear-”

there’s a lot more after that, things like succumbed to his injuries at 6:24 am and did everything they could and a real tragedy, but veronica does not hear them. her brain is a faulty record player, rewinding and playing that first sentence over and over again.

she starts to laugh before she can stop herself. it’s not funny, but some part of it is, a fucking bear, after everything, after he had survived every single thing her father had thrown his way. a bear. she claps a hand over her mouth to hide it, but the hysterical giggles don’t stop, just become more manic until the sound is indistinguishable from sobbing.

archie is dead. archie died. something about it is so god damned funny, made funnier by the gold locket around her neck, the love that tethers her to him like two cans with a string between them, a connection that exists even when they’re in two different worlds.

she realizes suddenly that the detective is still speaking to her on the phone, that josie has stopped singing and is looking at her oddly, that there are tears all down her face and she is making an awful, keening sound, desperate and inhuman.

“ms. lodge, please, there are other matters-” and then reggieis front of her, handsome face struck with worry, warm hand on her elbow.

“veronica, what is it?” he’s asking, voice blurry like he’s underwater. “veronica, what is wrong?”  
she presses her hands up to her face, feeling the makeup run slick and black between her fingers from where it’s mingled with saltwater. the phone drops from her hand, bounces merrily on the coiled cord a few times before reggie picks up, talking urgently into the speaker.

she can’t hear anything still, everything whiting out around her, but she watches as reggie’s face changes, as he goes dead pale and runs a hand through his hair and just holds it there, wrist threaded through with clear blue veins.

“everyone needs to leave!” josie says, ridiculous in her glittering dress and fingerwaves, shooing people out the front door. “we are closed for the evening.” there’s a couple serpents working security inside and they help her, menacing out the lingering partygoers with their leather jackets and dark looks. the room finally clears as reggie finishes up the call, hunched over with his face in his hands, not crying but close enough it doesn’t matter.

veronica’s still laughing a little, hands over her eyes, like she’ll pull back and it’ll be a different world behind her fingers.

“he’s really dead?” she asks, just in case she heard wrong, and reggie nods weakly, hands shaking badly enough for her to notice.

veronica stumbles over her heels the two steps it takes to reach him and then his arms are up around her and then they are sinking down to the floor, a tangle of limbs on the tile like little kids, sobbing and starving and completely, entirely lost.

x

reggie finds her upstairs after, sitting on the floor of her tiny attic bedroom. the urgency is still stunning him, the looping instinct to punch something, kick down the door, haul archie back from the dead with the sheer weight of his own want. he’s reminded strangely of the hysterical days after jason’s death, the panicky grief and strange hollowness, an emptiness so deep he could feel it ricochet through his skull.

veronica is curled up on the hardwood, her silky black sheets pooled around her like arterial blood. she’s drunk- he can see it in the hazy, miserable cast to her face, the ash of mascara smudged across the highest point in her cheekbone. she smiles crookedly when she sees him, a painful, cracked open thing, and he lingers awkwardly in the doorway, not knowing whether he’s invited inside.

“drink?” she asks, and sloshes the bottle of top-shelf whisky into an antique teacup before handing it off to him. reggie swallows in one go, and then crouches to sit beside her on the floor. the hardwood is cool in the blistering heat of the room and splintered with age, not muffling the sound of disturbance below.

veronica tops his drink off and then swallows her own in one go, jaw set like she’s going to find answers in the bottom of the cup. she doesn’t say anything else, and reggie lets the alcohol slide him messily into silence, observing the tiny room, so hot from the trapped heat that the air shimmers at the corners.

there’s no bed, just a mattress on the floor covered in a tangle of expensive sheets, makeshift nightstand next to it crammed with an overflowing ashtray and a stack of dostoevsky novels. there’s no curtains, so she’s tacked up silk slips over the windows, letting in hazy, abstract patches of light. the nicest thing in the room is the gleaming garment rack in the corner, holding up her sequined dresses and cigarette pants and collared blouses.

it’s a room strangely suited to veronica, her stubborn streak and her opulent tastes and cruel, mannered charm. the secondhand thrift store books and designer clothes, forgotten mugs of cold coffee and half drained bottle of whisky, her gleaming, ostentatious jewelry tangled up in an empty cocktail glass she stole from downstairs.

veronica interrupts his fragmented thoughts by setting her teacup down heavily, sloshing the last of the alcohol onto the floor. she’s still wearing her cocktail dress and it glitters in the dim light of the room, draws attention to her rumpled hair and bare feet.

“fuck all these perfect people,” she says, and reggie has no idea what she’s talking about, but also does, in some strange, sad way. the two of them were never quite meant for riverdale, washed out football star with the dead best friend and the ex-heiress with a skewed sense of morality and poison touch.

veronica clambers into his lap, her fingers cold and clammy on his neck. the room is unbearably hot but she’s shivering, teeth clattering when he slides a hand up her thigh, fingers catching in the tiny gaps of her fishnets.

his chest is a shipwreck. it’s unforgivable, that he still wants her with archie in a bodybag hundreds of miles away, his childhood sometimes nemesis and always friend. impossible that it is not enough to make him stop being in love with her, chest bloody and throat raw, nothing like the rom coms his older cousins would make him watch as a kid.

she smells like whisky and perfume and salt when he leans in to kiss her, twisting his fingers in her soft, dark hair. “ronnie,” he whispers, and feels her flinch against him.

“don’t call me that,” she says quietly as she closes the gap between them, and after that he doesn’t call her anything at all.

x

the funeral is arranged quickly and without ceremony, a private service at riverdale presbyterian. veronica steps inside in her black dress and her stomach immediately turns as she catches the blown up portrait at the front of the room, archie in his letterman jacket looking handsome and happy and young forever.

the choir is helmed by josie, and in any other circumstance she’d make a quip about asleep being more than a little passe as a choice in song, but now it burns at her, makes her blink hard against the tears threatening to fall. a crying girl is either easy sympathy or brutal weakness and she doesn’t want either right now, not in front of these friendly sad people. there’s a better world, josie sings, voice glassine and thin, and veronica hopes like hell that she’s right.

betty and jughead are clustered together in the front of the room, leaning against one another like two trees grown together, and she aches for that sort of closeness, the sort that she used to have in a different time, a better time. betty looks exhausted, bruises feathering the thin skin around her eyes and a weariness to her posture that veronica doesn’t recognize. jughead doesn’t look much better, beanie pulled low around his head and misery pulling his face tight.

veronica shuffles awkwardly into the processional line, watching as people give fred and mary their sympathies like children tossing coins in a fountain, making shining false wishes. fred smiles tiredly when he sees her, but mary eyes her suspiciously, blame pooling in the corners of her stiff smile. veronica feels it as keenly as if she’d been slapped and says nothing at all. she has nothing to offer them except her own failings, all the tiny places she made the wrong choice.

and then she’s in front of the casket, archie lying dead in front of her. the red of his hair is garish against his unnaturally pale skin, three angry pink scratches peaking up out of the collar of his button-down.

it still doesn’t feel real. she cannot wrap her brain around archie, archie, being dead, her golden boy with the guitar and the football trophies and the easy love she always thought was some sort of fantasy. it’s impossible that he can be gone, can just disappear with nothing besides that final phone call, the one she told herself was real but always secretly believed to be just one more obstacle, the long slide through the desert before the boy prince returned to his kingdom.

she is standing there with her arms curled around herself and the wind knocked clean out of her and she would start a war, burn down a city, do anything, anything at all, to get it all back, all the dumb precious moments she didn’t appreciate until they were gone.

archie throwing a beat up tennis ball for vegas, archie blowing out the candles of a birthday cake, archie strumming at his guitar. working on a car, eating ceral, unhooking her bra, failing a test, playing video games, eating a burger, all of it.

there is nothing elegant about this pain, nothing romantic, nothing noble. there’s nothing but the filthy, wrenching ache that blisters at her, her father’s rage simmering in her throat. she wants to laugh. she wants to die. she wants him back, his skin warm against hers and smile pressed to her spine. she wants to be anything that is not this moment, this time, this open blackhole of grief shattering the planets of her ego. there is nothing else.

x

veronica comes back from the funeral with the remnants of cigarette smoke and mourning flowers clinging to her hair. her pallor has become almost bruised lately, like something’s been wringing her out from the inside and leaving marks behind. it hurts for reggie to look at her, like staring directly at an eclipse.

she walks tiredly into le bonne nuit, gone pallid and empty in the light of day, and slumps over at one of the bar stools. she folds her hands into a steeple-like she’s praying, even though he knows better than to think that’s what she’s doing.

she looks so different than the self-assured princess that used to walk the hallways of riverdale high like she could tip the world with just a look. with all her gloss and polish stripped away veronica lodge is an awful lot like a teenage girl, raw and aching, a begging to be believed.

“want to get fucked up?” he asks, because it’s all he can offer. he isn’t good for very much and his father never lets him forget it, but he’s got an endless supply of booze and pills, magic tricks to make the world go numb.

veronica seems to think about it for a second before she nods. “i just want to forget,” she says, and reggie claws around his back pocket until two perfectly round pills emerge. he hands one to her and takes the other, watching as the car crash blue pill dissolves with a swallow of vodka.

time goes sideways after that, shatters like a baseball bat to bone. they drink and drink and drink, like a fist to teeth, like lightning splitting a tree in half, like snow burying the suburbs until there are nothing left. they get plastered like it’s a race to the bottom of a cliff, falling from tipsy to drunk to incoherent, incapable of doing anything.

he has no idea how they end up in a club, only that suddenly he’s watching veronica sob in the neon flash of the strobe lights, shiny tears going acid green and bubblegum pink. he has a hazy half-memory of doing coke in the bathroom earlier, a couple shaky lines before a hysterically giggling veronica dragged him back out by the wrist.

reggie tries to find her hand in the messy tangle of limbs, and she collapses into him, sending them unsteadily into the ground, knocking over a tray of empties along the way. they’re both crying in the glittery mess of shattered glass and blood, everything flashing under the lights, and then security is hauling them up with muttered swears, pushing them out the door and into the cold night air with strict orders not to come back.

veronica stumbles tipsily for a half step before falling, knees bloody when she scrapes them on the pavement. reggie can’t stop laughing, like a sickness, high and frantic and feverish, and after a minute veronica joins in, just as unhinged. there are weird flickers at the corner of his vision, and for a second he swears he can see jason, disappearing around the edge of an alley.

the sun is coming up, glowing orange at the edge of distant buildings. reggie takes the tab of ecstasy he had stuck in the back of his wallet and lets everything disappear again.

x

they sleep like much younger children, or perhaps castaways, reggie crying in his sleep with the ceiling fan going overhead, both of them clinging to one another under sheets that need to be washed, the trapped heat of the attic almost unbearable.

veronica has strange nightmares, fueled by the candy-colored pills reggie dissolves on her tongue and the neverending spill of alcohol, rum with dry toast for breakfast and sloppy bloody mary’s in the afternoon and tequila when the sunlight starts to thicken. there’s no one around to make them go to school, so they just stop, spend days fucking around in the shell of the bonne nuit, making out on the bar when they get high enough to forget one another’s faces.

reggie snorts lines of fizzle rocks to make her laugh about kiddie drugs and she decides to forget about everything else, about school and work and debts and obligation. she’ll do this until the drugs and bad decisions finally do her the favor of killing her this time. there’s a strange liberation to it. she doesn’t have to try to claw her way into being a good person anymore, doesn’t have to live up to expectations, doesn’t have to do anything that isn’t what she wants.

the nights are worse. veronica dreams betty’s face peeling off and archie’s there behind it, her father with a bullet in his forehead and melted gold dripping instead of blood, the whole world falling to seizure and convulsing on the floor. she wakes up with tears on her cheeks and then she’s thrust into another nightmare, reggie crying beside her with jason’s name caught in between his teeth and sweat beading her forehead.

it’s a miracle when they’re both able to sleep, snatched hours in between the last haze of drunkenness and the brutal set of her hangovers, barely felt before she’s chasing them with the hair of the dog.

people call at first, betty and her mother and even jughead, once, but veronica doesn’t reply. they’re searching for a girl who was never really there, a carefully crafted illusion that she is too tired to pretend to be.

(maybe it was real, once. a few times. in coat closet at a party she wasn’t invited to. on archie’s doorstep with the stupid, embarrassing love stringing out their sentences. at a lake filled with clean blue water and now-broken promises.)

“veronica,” reggie murmurs, drunk and tired, curled up with his eyes closed. “let’s go live on the moon.”  
she laughs and says “of course,” because she’s already followed him to hell and never made it back, and they plan out the whole thing, how they’ll steal the couches from the common room at riverdale to watch all the dead stars. his body next to hers is a miracle that bursts at the underside of her jaw, a miracle in a world where all the miracles have died.

x

she’s sitting on the edge of the bar with her feet propped up on the stool, drinking a gin and tonic as she watches reggie count bills, the last of their money from the bonne nuit.

“it’s been three months,” she says, because the thought has been swimming around her head all day and she needs to get it out, needs to purge herself of the thought. veronica watches as reggie stiffens, as the muscles in his shoulders go tense for a moment.

“it feels like it was yesterday,” he says.

the song changes, something slow and sad echoing in the acoustics of the room, and he puts down the fan of bills, slowly makes his way over to her.

reggie looks at her for a moment, like he’s trying to decide something, and then slowly, slowly, offers her his hand. she takes it, looking at him curiously as he pulls her up to stand.

he smooths her hair away from her neck, reaching back to gently unhook the locket around her neck, the only possession she cares for anymore. veronica wants to scream, wants to hit him, wants to burst into tears, but he puts it gently down on the bar and then takes her hand again, pulling her onto the makeshift dancefloor.

they swing their arms between them a few times, like children, and then he spins her clumsily, twisting her arm to duck underneath it and startling a laugh out of her. he’s so present, the universe would die of sunstroke if there were any more of him. veronica realizes it suddenly and terribly, as she steps on his feet and he dips her almost far enough to drop her, that she loves him, that she needs him like she needs blood and organ and tissue. she loves his cowardice and his brokenness and his arrogance like she does the small, tender pieces that emerge at the oddest of moments.

they’re sashaying around, laughing wildly, and then her face is pressed into his neck and his arms are around her and they are both crying a little bit, out of breath.

“i love you, you know?” he says, and she laughs.

she loves him too. and she doesn’t think it matters. but she wishes it did.


	3. valentine's day

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> he knows it’s love when his brain goes quiet around her. jughead’s mind is an anxious, skitttering thing, thinking and thinking and thinking and thinking. it’s the only thing that keeps him alive, sometimes, that frantic ticking, that silverquick merging of nerves and synapses. don’t slow down, don’t turn back, let your hands play an adagio across the cheap laptop keyboard like if you play fast enough it’ll save you. it’s the only way he knows how to survive. but betty looks at him, eyes blue-green like swimming pools, and suddenly everything else falls away, becomes entirely inconsequential. she walks into class, hair pulled up into a swinging ponytail, and he misses her even when she’s right there next to him. he loves her like the patient loves the anaesthetic, like the accused loves the guillotine, like the serpent loves the switchblade.

_ what is hell? i maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love. _

\- the brothers karamazov, fyodor dostoevsky

 

_ fred & f.p _

it’s the summer f.p grows out his hair so fred does, too. the summer after sophomore year, sixteen and stupid, speeding down the highway and getting stoned in the woods and laying on the carpet listening to music. it’s the summer f.p’s mouth tastes like blue raspberry slurpees and the vodka they slosh in, looking out over the small blinking lights of riverdale from their spot on the overpass. all of these nothing moments made suddenly severe. even at the very best of times fred knows it can’t really last, not for good, knows that the threads of their lives, tangled together and knotted through, will eventually unspool. f.p burns too bright and too hot for things to last very long, a dwarf star always at supernova. still. fred will love him right now, like this, in the sleepovers that last entire weeks, in the strange intimacy that comes with it, in waking up at two in the afternoon and arguing over breakfast, crawling up onto the roof at night and searching for constellations, going for walks around the neighborhood with bare feet and shared cigarettes. 

 

_ tom & sierra _

she calls him downstairs on the house phone when her parents and siblings are asleep upstairs, the kitchen gone illicit in the quiet dark of night, broken up by jagged patches of moonlight across the tiles. sierra dials as she sinks to the floor, sits cross-legged and wraps the phone cord around her fingers until the skin blanches. “tell me about your day,” tommy says, every night, that same sentence.  _ tell me about your day.  _ she’s so used to having to fight for every scrap of attention she’s given, mentally gritting her teeth to be the brightest and shiniest at the dinner table, clamoring in the mass of limbs and voices that are her brothers and sisters. she never has to try with tommy. she starts off like a bullet leaving its casing and it’ll be hours before she’s exhausted all the words that stack up in her fingers and get stuck in the folds of her vertebrae when no one is listening. he never minds at all, she can hear how closely he’s paying attention through the broken up waves of the telephone. “i love you,” she says, when the codes are unscrambled and the anagrams unwired, and there’s no beat of hesitation, no other people in the world when he says “i love you, too.”

 

_ alice & hal _

love is so embarrassing. alice feels it in the rush of blood to her cheeks, this humiliating sort of tenderness that never recedes, just rises up like a tide. “we’re meant to be doing spreads,” hal mumbles into her mouth, and alice rolls her eyes but sprawls onto the grass next to him anyways, pulling her top down. there are two freshman whispering on the other side of the courtyard, giggling as they watch them, making out in the middle of the day. hal holds a hand up to block the sun- long fingers, slim wrist, wide palm, doodle that she drew in fifth period fading on his knuckles. “fuck off!” alice calls cheerily to the freshman still watching, sunlight glinting off the cheap material of her fishnets. hal claps a hand over her mouth. “christ, al,” he says, amused despite himself, and she laughs into his palm, feeling her breath against the thin skin of his hand. he shivers, and alice wants to be locked in a room with him forever, the key lost and whole world outside. 

 

_ hermione & f.p _

it always starts with fred for the two of them, catalyst for their fuck ups and triumphs, moments of strange selflessness and unwieldy egoism. hiram and fred both failed to live up to valentine’s day expectations and fred and f.p are in a fight about fred blowing their plans to go on a roadtrip. this is how it starts; a need to make someone else jealous, to justify their own decision making. f.p isn’t good at love but he is at sex, this thing that makes lonely feel like a lullaby and soothes the fever hot itching under his skin. girls usually want him because they want to take him home and see how deep the illusion runs, whether the bad boy really does have a heart of gold. hermione is different, when she invites him to her house saturday afternoon to  _ study _ . there’s a strange coldness to her, even as her sticky vanilla lipgloss slides hot over his mouth. she’s so prissy but there’s a weird, hard edge, a girl buoyed by the same cruel confidence as the boys that talk shit about her in the locker room. she stretches after, small breasts yawning as her shoulders pop, and f.p thinks that maybe fred doesn’t know her at all. 

 

_ fred & mary _

mary knows the look that fred gets when he wants her. it’s something slightly mocking. chewing gum, slack jawed in a way she shouldn’t find attractive but somehow, terribly does. he flirts with everyone so it shouldn’t flatter her, that he drapes an arm around her shoulder when they’re all going out, declares loudly that she is the  _ best of friends and best of women,  _ trips her when they’re walking through the snow and drops handfuls of ice down her back. he flirts with everyone but mary wants to know more, wants to find the echoing, hollow space inside him, whatever it is responsible for his thrilling highs and deep blue lows. she wants to kiss him and make him cry, wants to find the right variables so that the equation finally balances. maybe that’s why she takes him into the bathroom at nicky mantle’s birthday party, drops to her knees and tries to unstitch the carefully crafted illusion of laid-back stoner, tries to find the real person underneath and it won’t occur to her until she is staring down the divorce papers that she never really succeeded. 

 

_ hiram & hermione _

hiram was named to be a tyrant and it shows- it’s all over his blood like dna evidence. he’s a boy king with a sharp smile and lipstick smudged on his fingers, a princeling crawling bloody-knuckled to a throne he’s never had legitimate claim to but wants anyways. hermione isn’t beautiful, not exactly, but she’s made of the same stuff and he knows it. sometimes her jaw clenches so tightly it pops, the pressure of being alive seizing her, pulling every bone down into a jolt. hiram looks at the diamonds coiled around her throat and sees only a hall of mirrors. both of them have a blood-tipped spear at the center of them, a relentless coil of raw ambition. “you’re like me,” hiram tells her on their first date, and she knows without having to be told that this is the highest compliment he has to offer. the hitch in her breath has nothing to do with the hand up her skirt. 

 

_ jughead & betty _

he knows it’s love when his brain goes quiet around her. jughead’s mind is an anxious, skitttering thing, thinking and thinking and thinking and thinking. it’s the only thing that keeps him alive, sometimes, that frantic ticking, that silverquick merging of nerves and synapses. don’t slow down, don’t turn back, let your hands play an adagio across the cheap laptop keyboard like if you play fast enough it’ll save you. it’s the only way he knows how to survive. but betty looks at him, eyes blue-green like swimming pools, and suddenly everything else falls away, becomes entirely inconsequential. she walks into class, hair pulled up into a swinging ponytail, and he misses her even when she’s right there next to him. he loves her like the patient loves the anaesthetic, like the accused loves the guillotine, like the serpent loves the switchblade. 

 

_ veronica & reggie _

reggie is the only person she can stand to see her in pieces. she isn’t quite sure why it is. maybe it’s because he’s as broken as she is, seams split everywhere and spilling blood onto the expensive tiles of the bonne nuit. he comes into the bathroom as she’s brushing her teeth and she talks around the foam, no makeup on and wearing nothing but a baggy t-shirt that once belonged to archie. veronica knows she’s fucked because she likes his anger and his bitterness and his neediness as much as she does his snarky wit and his marrow deep kindness. to say exactly what you think without analyzing the consequences is a crime when you grow up a lodge, and yet veronica keeps committing it around him, lets her bitchy asides and deep tragedies slip out from her tongue and into the air, where it becomes real. reggie kisses her and he smells like hair gel and vodka and there are so many things that are good and so many that could be good but won’t and for a dizzying, terrible moment veronica feels truly known. 

 

_ kevin & joaquin _

kevin doesn’t often miss joaquin but sometimes he does. he was always a little too in love with the idea of him, with his dark hair and clear eyes and peculiar blend of arrogance and vulnerability. his entire personality was a story kevin never stopped telling himself, and now he is dead and the world is on fire and kevin wants a better story, an ending that doesn’t take place in the desert, a long slide from the kingdom. love is impossible and it goes on despite the impossible. he draws  _ preppy  _ in the condensation on the bus window on the way to school. he buys packs of camel crushes, not to smoke, just to to remind himself of the sensation of sharing a cigarette, joaquin’s hand bony and soft-skinned. he dreams, vividly, of joaquin’s hair- matte black, not glossy or shiny, just soft and dull under kevin’s fingers when he’d run his hands through it. he dreams of the elegant planes of his face, the sharp bark of his laugh, the missing that never really heals, just gets farther away. 

 

_ betty & veronica _

they will always exist in the realm of possibility. veronica knows it will never happen, that the universe is strange and it makes no apologies, but still she will sometimes wonder about who she was really staring at the first time she walked into the diner. whether it really was the boy with red hair, after all. a best friend is a rare thing, a chemical reaction that defies the rules of gravity and social conduct, and sometimes being betty’s friend feels like the biggest responsibility in the world, like she’s holding a single, precious, ill-fitting ring and trying not to lose it swimming in the ocean. they aren’t supposed to be together- none of their wounds line up. they don’t have one another’s history worn into the grooves of their brains, terribly different and equally as wrong. betty is good and she’s also sometimes terrible, betty makes big sweeping promises about justice and refuses to see what’s in front of her, betty is her friend and sometimes veronica wants to knot her fingers through her fine blonde hair. she dreams about that fucking cheerleading tryout, the flickering heat of one mouth against another, and wakes up tasting salt. 

 

_ reggie & jason _

reggie is drunk and high at the same time.  _ crossed,  _ jason called it earlier, so he’s picked up now and is gonna start saying it at school tomorrow. he’s always been one of the cool kids, even if he has to try for it, even as he mirrors and deflects and uses his tall frame to wield aggression like a punch to the face. to be fourteen is to be punished for a crime you didn’t know you even committed. they’re up in his bedroom, and he doesn’t really know how they made it back from the party at ginger lopez’s, what time it is or what time they left. he’s vaguely aware that the skin is scraped clean off his left knee, blood trickling down down his ankle from where he fell on the sidewalk, seeping into his sock. jason is alien looking in the hazy light, red hair and pale, pale skin and even more fucked up than he is. reggie tries to pull his shirt off and pitches forward and then they’re laughing their asses off and then jason’s chapped lip is against his mouth, and reggie feels like a flashlight that’s been knocked on the head to turn it back on, dazed and furiously bright. he’ll wake up the next morning with clothes scattered across jason’s bedroom floor and say  _ dude, i was so fucking crossed, i can’t remember anything past ten. _

 

_ archie & jughead _

they sleep in the same bedroom and sometimes it burns jughead up, the steady rise and fall of archie’s breathing, blue coverlet pulled up to his chin. it feels like breaking and entering, to be awake at hours like this, to listen to the quiet rythyms of the andrews household. jughead can’t quite relax into it, can’t quite help feeling that someone is about to stumble in loudly through the front door, a baby is about to start crying, a woman’s tears are about to bleed through the walls. the way he feels about archie is a loose tooth at the back of his mouth, natural and still wrong, something that he cannot stop prodding at. easy to forget about if you expend enough mental energy. he doesn’t want archie in the way of his mother’s romance novels, the prince in drag and gagged up cliches. it’s more that archie sometimes feels like more of himself than he is, like they’re made up of all the same things, a shared history in one another’s back pocket. sometimes archie smiles at him a certain way and the hope alights in his chest, dangerous and disqueting, and then jughead glimpses at the holes in his jeans and addiction in his blood and knows beyond any reasonable doubt that boys like archie andrews are not for boys like him. 

_ veronica & archie _

archie is a dream that veronica never wants to stop having. she traces the planes of his face with her manicured fingers as he sleeps and wonders at his existence, as all-american as apple pie and ticker tape parades and yet something more, too. he’s so earnest that sometimes she’s embarrassed for him, the honesty that shines in his eyes when he says  _ i love you, ronnie.  _ he hums along with bob dylan on the radio but has no idea who stevie nicks is. he talks himself in circles in english class and still somehow has the best points. he is somewhere in between golden boy and flesh and blood teenager and the molecules in him are tearing themselves apart trying to decide between the two. loving him is the cruelest thing she’s ever done- there’s a reason you’re not supposed to touch the art at the museum, a reason that you do not love boys you know you are going to ruin. veronica sees pretty houses and she wants the two of them in them, sitting in the living room until they decay into the carpet. 

 

_ cheryl & toni _

cheryl has the awkward tenderness of someone who’s never been loved and is forced to improvise. she automatically hates the same people toni hates without needing any sort of justification. she buys ridiculous, frivolous things she can’t really afford but wants toni to have, silk bedding and good champagne and bracelets studded with diamonds. she touches her in an absurdly careful sort of way, like what they could have could break under the touch of an index finger. cheryl is so alive, all the time, like she’s bleeding out at full speed, and toni’s head spins with her dramas and contradictions, her chaotic energy and swimming pools of tragedy. she’s a pendulum constantly swinging, crying in the shower at two in the afternoon one day and then laughing and cleaning out her closet the next. and yet she’s soft in the moments that matter, brings toni coffee in bed and blinks at her with mascara ash around her eyes and tells her she loves her with a chosen sort of reverence. “i don’t really know how to do this,” she admits once, in a rare moment of honesty, and toni thinks of her sixteen years of slammed doors and older men and jughead jones’s blood and tears in her mouth. “me neither,” she admits, and cheryl’s smile cracks the planet open, sunlight streaming out.

  
  



	4. a series of images from 1992 (parentdale)

_A SERIES OF IMAGES FROM 1992_

i. fp and fred at their spot in the woods, small clearing packed into the dense expanse of trees. girls’ names carved into and subequently crossed out from the sycamore tree, crushed beer cans tossed around the badly made firepit, history worn into the carpet of pine needles they’re sprawled out on. passing a cigarette back and forth even though fred promised mary last week that he’s qutting. the sort of silence that means more than conversation ever really could.  
  
ii. six am on sunday morning, mary walking home from a house party, air almost warm with the promise of summer coming. morning light thin and weak on the trees, breeze on her bare legs and high waisted jean shorts. left sock stained red from spilled jungle juice, hangover swirling in her temple, a strange happiness pulsing through her that she can’t find a reason for. replaying the memories of the night before over and over like a favorite song.  
  
iii. sierra and tom, breaking into the riverdale high swimming pool at eleven on a monday night. sierra splashing tom with neon blue water, flourescent under the shifting lights, their laughter echoing loud around the empty room. fear of getting caught pumping adrenaline into their systems, sharpening the joy when tom hikes her legs up around his waist, presses her back against the chilly, slick tile. both of them shivering when he fumbles with the green strings of her bikini.  
  
iv. alice brushing her teeth in the bathroom mirror, homecoming dress on, hal perched on the bathtub next to her and talking shit about the new kid on layout while he fiddles with his boutonniere. half an hour late and joking about skipping homecoming altogether. alice grinning hard through the foam, black dress from the thrift store shimmering under the overhead lights, pregnancy test with a plus sign hidden in the trash can. terribly in love and even more afraid.  
  
v. football game, hermione glittering with sweat and facepaint and youth at the top of the pyramid, alice in the stands with her nails bloody from chewing on them and ink on her temple, mary and fred already out on the field, forsythe pendleton jones the second with a missing helmet and sweaty hair and tears streaking through his black facepaint, championship game won and all of them screaming their lungs out, time stopped by the ferocity of their joy.  
  
vi. they could be anywhere in the world, fp coughs, fred knows he needs a cigarette.  
  
vii. hiram, standing on a toilet blowing cigarette smoke out an air vent at school. hermione, not allowed to be in the boys bathrooms, sitting on the sink and correcting the grammar on his english essay with a red pen. faint sounds of the gym class they’re both supposed to be in echoing from outside. the afternoon sun turns his hair into an unreal shade of blue-black, and hermione bites her lip hard enough to draw blood, correcting a semicolon.

  
viii. crammed into a booth at pop’s, fp pours syrup on mary’s scrambled eggs, she “accidentally” spills her hot coffee into his lap and gets a look from pop. alice, hair knotted into a bun at the top of her head, argues with sierra about bush’s foreign policy while fred, not listening, dips his fries into her milkshake. hal orders cherry pie for the entire table, asks pop to wait on the check, they’re going to be here for awhile.  
  
ix. fp, too drunk, lip busted from a fight he doesn’t remember and blood and beer split down the front of his white t-shirt. out in the mantle’s backyard, steam curling up off his feverish body in the winter air, unable to stand without his arms hooked around alice and fred’s shoulders. he vomits again, alcohol and stomach bile, barely missing his green converse, alice hissing that he drank too much again, fred much too silent, this is becoming routine.  
  
x. gladys, singing along to the radio, windows rolled down, cherry red slushee in the cup next to her and the dirty thrill of summer. trying not to stare at alice in the passenger seat, her bare feet propped up against the dashboard, purple-green bruises on both knees and hard ankles, mouth stained blue from her slushee. gladys can hear her heartbeat loud in her ears, like sex or a gunshot, speedometer ticking steadily upwards towards ninety miles an hour.  
  
xi. hermione and mary, passed out in the master bedroom at lodge’s house after a football party. hermione’s arm tossed over mary’s stomach, chests rising and falling in tandem, glossy dark hair spilling over both of their faces. mary, stirring awake, still a little drunk and eyes adjusting to the pitch black darkness. hermione’s breath is hot at her cheek, smelling like expensive perfume and vomit, and something kindles in the bottom of mary’s stomach, sour and sweet and forbidden.  
  
xii. it is dark and cold and anything but lonely in the quiet first snowfall of the year. gladys has a bottle of merlot, fp has a riesling, and the warmth she feels has nothing to do with the wine. the moment is more bitter than sweet, and illuminating; he’s close enough she can feel his heartbeat, and it’s like she’s finally _seeing_ him. _to the future_ she says and they drink, _to the past_ he says and they drink.  
  
xiii. skinny dipping in sweetwater river, the whole world is clear shades of blue and green. hermione screams when fp pushes her into the water, fred passes around a joint, mary gets a sunburn on her shoulders. alice does cartweels down the narrow strip of beach and sierra and tommy disappear for an hour and come back with their clothes out of place and graduation is thundering around the corner like a train, but here, right now, it is real.

 


	5. glycerine (betty/jughead)

he’s in bed when betty arrives, half sleeping under a tangled comforter, the sound of j.b’s music next door lulling him him into unconsciousness. the events of the past week ( _ month, year _ , however long it’s been since that july fourth that changed all of them), are still surreal, too strange to get his hands on, all except for the pain that ebbs and flows through his body.

“jug, i’m here!” betty calls from the front, and then appears in the doorway a second later, hair yanked into its familiar ponytail and flushed high in her cheeks. in the dim light her eyes are car crash blue, startling when she pauses in the doorway, assessing. “you’re hurt.”

there are different kinds of hurt. three broken fingers on his left hand. a mother whose love and cruelty taste the same. bruises a shade of burst plum all up his ribcage. the difference between the children they were and the scarred up, barely adults they’ve been forced into becoming. sprained wrist. bloody teeth. bad heart.

“it’s not that bad,” he says, struggling into an upright position. betty blinks twice and then clambers onto the bed, surprisingly ungraceful. she kneels in front of him, pushing the hair back from his forehead to examine the thin cut along his hairline. “really, betts, don’t worry about it.”

her mouth purses, displeased. “i’m sorry i wasn’t there,” is all she says, soft. it’s barely a consideration- they are both fighting their own wars, terrified of fire and unable to stop dropping lit matches.  he catches her wrist from where her hand is still at his forehead and brings it down, presses a kiss to the palm of her hand, well-manicured and ropy with scar tissue. 

“you’re here now,” he murmurs, and she leans down to kiss him. they’ve done this a thousand times and it’s still astounding, the feeling of her arms looping around his neck, her mouth warm and insistent against his. it’s a small miracle every time. a miracle in a town that ran out of them a long time ago. she slips her tongue into his mouth and then pulls back, like she’s trying to stop herself. a wisp of blonde hair has escaped from her ponytail.

“that needs ice,” she says suddenly, looking at his busted to hell left hand. it’s a mess, swollen and purpling, split open knuckles smearing blood down his fingers. 

“it looks worse than it is,” he says, dismissive. 

“you need your writing hand,” she protests, the cheap mattress straining when she clambers out of the bed, pads off to the kitchen to dig through the freezer. the music in j.b’s room changes ( _ i could not change though i wanted to)  _ and then betty reappers, holding a bag of frozen peas. 

“hand,” betty orders, and jughead obliges, lets her press the frozen vegetables to his bloody, swollen hand. he hisses at the raw sting against his cuts, and betty makes a small, soothing noise, adjusting until the cold begins to sink in and make his hand go quickly, blissfully numb.

“not too bad,” she says, almost to herself, fussing with bandages and antisepic from a tiny, dinky first aid kit she must have found from god knows where. 

he would love her if they lived on mars. he would love her if they were outlaws somewhere in the wild west. he loves her here, in his childhood bedroom with the ashes of the world around it, with blood in his mouth and universes in his eyes.   

  
  



	6. holocene (post szn iii)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> and at once i knew i was not magnificent

_and at once i knew i was not magnificent_

what is evil? what predisposes it? this thing that curled black up the spine of her father, twining up into the brainstem and blooming poison there like an injection. this mite that sits in the back of her brain, a spot of dark she imagines amongst the healthy pink sponge, something doctors would wince at if they could see it across an mri scan. something that will eat away at her through the years, poisoning organs until her eyes shine with the bright green malice of her father before her, of her sister somewhere out there in the world. she wonders when it will come to her, if it will come to her, if the feeling of relinquishing to it will feel more like surrender or coming home.

the dreams are always about running. such a small part of such a strange, blurred out nightmare of dirt and blood and contorted faces, betty’s pulse weak under his fingers and blonde hair gleaming under the moonlight. his father says  _it’s over_ and archie says  _let’s forget it_ and betty says  _when it came time to choose, we chose right_ and yet he dreams each night of that mad dash through the woods, feet bloodied  the sun coming up in the distance, the light surreal and terrible. he had thought it would never stop, at the time, thought that if he slowed for a single minute it would all be over, that there would never be an end of it. he wakes up and tastes salt, feels his heart jackhammer in his ribs for the first problem he cannot think his way out of.

she wanders the empty, elegant halls of the pembroke and feels like ophelia, like bertha mason, like persephone, like any of those women undone by their own wanting. she imagines herself like some gothic woman wasting away amongst all that ancestral beauty, silk bathrobe cinched around the waist and bare feet on marble. riverdale used to unmoor her in a good way, used to shake up her world of glass and concrete and stone in a way that glittered. now, the chaos suffocates. she had the gold and the sequins and the champagne and it was not enough to protect against the long and storied tradition of women trapped in haunted houses of their own creation, horror reverberating through the walls.

bodies can be haunted. he shouldn’t feel so old at sixteen, bones strained with exhaustion and muscles vibrating with a phantom pain. the ache never goes away, ebbs and flows under the surface of skin and bubbles up into bruises and cuts, into broken bones that always heal just a little wrong. in a way it feels good. a punch to the face is a clean sort of pain, ricochets through the teeth and cracks his nose open with the force of it, turns all the hurt inside out, into something real. for that white hot moment nothing else exists. at night he pulls the covers up to his chin and burns, feels the echoes of geraldine’s mouth along his stomach and something sharp against his collarbone and the bullet that pierced jason blossom’s skull and ended them all


End file.
